Category: Current Events

Scranton Joe Biden on the Stump

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I come before you today to remind you that you have a choice.  You can either vote for me; humble, lovable Joe Biden or for that Dog-faced Pony Soldier Donald Trump.  And as that clean, articulate black man Barack Obama once said, Donald Trump will never be President of the United States.

Okay, sure, that was wrong and he did become president but hopefully not again anyway.  As my Uncle Bosey once told me, “Stay away from cannibals because they’ll eat you and you’ll never be found afterwards.”  And that’s damn good advice.  Now they’re trying to say he wasn’t eaten by cannibals but who other than cannibals would eat him?  Let’s be sensible here.  He wasn’t eaten by vegans, that’s for damn sure.

But seriously folks, you can’t trust Donald Trump.  He never rides on the Amtrak.  He’s always taking first class airline flights.  He’s not one of us.  That’s because he wants to put y’all back in chains.  And if you vote for Donald Trump you ain’t black.  No joke!

When my son Hunter was killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine fighting the Soviets he was dressed sort of like Rambo and with the muscles and the camo, so it was really something.  I remember him saying, “I just want my country to love me as much as I love it.”  And it was beautiful.  And then Xerxes army surrounded us and I threw my spear at him but only cut his face a little and then I was killed by a lot of arrows.  But luckily, I got better and here I am.  And that’s how we won in Ukraine.  Trump has never been killed in war nor have his sons so how can you trust him?

And if you think about it, Donald Trump is a lot like Corn Pop.  They’re both bad dudes who don’t follow the rules and probably don’t even wait an hour after eating before going back in the pool.  If I had the time, I’d like to bring both of them behind the shed and teach them a lesson with my bicycle chain and my boxing skills.  I’m not bragging I’m just saying that’s what I’d like to do but I can’t because of these new laws about fighting and the whole gay thing.  You’ve got to be careful not to say the wrong thing, which is tricky.

But forget all that for a minute, just remember how much better things are now that I fixed the economy.  I fixed the COVID and then I eliminated college loan debt and I got rid of gasoline and oil and now we’ve got electric cars and electric heat and everything is all electric and that’s progress.  Sure, if you’re still using the gasoline and the oil it’s a little more expensive.  And sure, maybe food and rent are up a few pennies but we’re all doing much better now than under Trump.  Just look at your 401K accounts they’re rocketing.  Why all of my green energy stocks are through the roof.  And just last week Nancy Pelosi showed me her stock portfolio and it was worth six hundred million dollars and you can’t hate that!  All these people in the Trump commercials saying they can’t make ends meet must be lying.  No joke!

So as my friend Madame Secretary of State Clinton said a while ago, “basket of deplorables.”  These dead-enders clinging to their guns and their God don’t have the votes to keep Scranton Joe Biden from coming back and finishing up his mission in Washington.  I’m going to fundamentally transform the whole United States of America into Scranton.  And you can bet your bottom dollar that’s what I’ll do.  The whole country will be just like the Scranton you see today.  Full of Amtrak stations, migrant housing, repurposed police precincts and prisons, welfare offices, needle exchange safe places, transgender bathrooms and Section 8 housing.  Welcome to the future.  So, make sure you vote for me every chance you get.  I really need your help.  Help!!!

So Much for Speaker Johnson

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Well, let’s see how the extreme right-wing Mike Johnson did this week.

With the help of his friends in the Democrat party he passed the Ukraine funding and reauthorized warrantless spying on Americans in the FISA courts.

https://rollcall.com/2024/04/19/rule-for-emergency-aid-bill-adopted-with-democratic-support/

https://rollcall.com/2024/04/20/senate-sends-surveillance-reauthorization-bill-to-bidens-desk/

Oh well done Mr. Johnson.

All I can say is the Republicans are hopeless.  I don’t know if they blackmailed or bribed or fooled him into doing these things but he did their will and so we can expect more of the same from now on.

Might as well have been Pelosi.  The horror continues.

The Cannibals Ate My Uncle Bosey

photog Biden Humor, Current Events, Humor

The regulars here know how I feel about cannibals. In my mind cannibalism is the necessary signpost on the road to convince people that it’s time to change course.

But only Joe Biden can wield cannibalism as a comic tool to unite us in the knowledge that the man in the White House is no longer firing on all cylinders.

Biden was going down a long road to show that his family are staunch supporters of the military but Trump is a military hater.

Instead what we get is, “Uncle Bosey was eaten by cannibals.” As things stand I’d be worried if I were a New Guinean. Being reminded of Bosey’s fate could spark a new military operation to recover the remains of Bosey. Maybe a few teeth or possibly his wristwatch or something. They could airdrop Hunter in with a duffel bag full of hundred dollar bills and crack cocaine. He’d get to the bottom of things.

Military records about his uncle’s death state that, “For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”

Honestly, I prefer the version where Bosey was lunch. I think all of Biden’s family should end up in the soup pot. It would be their finest hour.

Could I Be an Engagement Farmer?

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I woke today to a panic on X.  Elon Musk threatened, “Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source”.

I thought, “Oh no, the jig is up!”

Then I thought, “What the hell is engagement farming?”

So, I did a search and found out, “Well, to a large extent, we all go to social media either for or to give attention. It is in this context that this phenomenon known as engagement farming crops up. It’s the art of cultivating interactions through cunning tactics rather than genuine content.”

It consists of, “ Leading questions   …  Inflammatory content.   …   Clickbait headlines   …   Desperate pleas.”

Let’s see.  Check, check, check and check!

Dammit, Elon Musk has caught on to me and is coming to get me!

Now maybe I’m wrong but doesn’t the internet, more or less, consist of nothing but those things?  You could say that clickbait is in the eye of the beholder but isn’t that also the basis of the whole news industry?  What is a 72-point headline but the paper equivalent of clickbait?  Now sure, the subject must be something important if you blare it out there but the motivation is the same, get someone to bite the hook and buy the paper.

Now sure, someone who actually cares about what they are writing has a somewhat different result.  Intelligent people respond to intelligent writing and idiots don’t.  They stop at the point where a girl in a short skirt walks by.  Now far be it from me to disparage girls in short skirts.  They basically make the world go round.  But there has to be something afterward to think about.

So, if Elon Musk is saying he’s going to remove the sex bot clickbait from his platform I applaud him.  There are already enough outlets providing that media.  But if he’s going to eliminate the engagement farming won’t there be nothing left at all?

And I appreciate his desire to improve X and try to elevate the content.  But in order to do that he should be working on his algorithms to find out how to differentiate actual engagement from bot traffic.  And I hardly think any of us can help him there.  It seems to me it will require the ability to differentiate AI from human responses.  And to my mind the only way to do that is to monetize the interactions.  In other words, people will pay to be entertained, bots by definition will not.

And that’s a good point.  The advertising model for entertainment has been blown up by the tech lords.  Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising to such an extent that newspapers and television have been effectively driven out of business.  The future will belong to subscription services.  And I’m sure Mr. Musk knows this.  His trick will be to make the transition.  His hope is to turn X into a one stop shopping location for news, entertainment and other information-based activities.  Since he seems to be friendlier to people of my political persuasion I am more or less sympathetic to his efforts.  I’ve even bought a lower tier subscription to X and watch hopefully for some future benefits that his enterprises may afford me.

But now I find Elon is gunning for me!  We poor farmers of engagement are doing our best to absorb what little nutrients we can squeeze out of X traffic.  And instead, we are hounded out of existence by the algorithm!  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Well, the show must go on.

Could I be an engagement farmer?

I wish!

Once in a Billion Years

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“In the 4-billion-odd-year history of life on Earth, primary endosymbiosis is thought to have only happened twice that we know of, and each time was a massive breakthrough for evolution. The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria.

The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when some of these more advanced cells absorbed cyanobacteria that could harvest energy from sunlight. These became organelles called chloroplasts.  

And now, scientists have discovered that it’s happening again. A species of algae called Braarudosphaera bigelowii was found to have engulfed a cyanobacterium that lets them do something that algae, and plants in general, can’t normally do – “fixing” nitrogen straight from the air, and combining it with other elements to create more useful compounds.”

Endosymbiosis.  That’s a good name for it.  The article says this process has been going on for a 100 million years and is still probably a work in progress.  These nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria haven’t reached the advanced state of dependence that mitochondria and chloroplasts now display.

Well, the biologists will be playing around with this experiment in progress for the next hundred years and I expect they’ll learn plenty.  One day we’ll probably have chloroplasts of our own and spend a few hours in the sun every day to improve our green complexions.

Sawdust and Forever Wars

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Well, the boys from the road crew were back today and finished off the job, but good.  A tractor trailer was blocking my driveway and the trailer was an open topped box that was rapidly filled by an enormous wood chipper that ate whole sections of tree trunks that were ten feet around.  The noise that came off of this thing was considerable and the hounds were incensed.  The chipper finished off the big white pine in less than an hour and that included all the scraps that they had trimmed off the trunk.

Then they moved on and took care of the two ash trees.  These were smaller but the hardness of the wood gave the machine a different sonic tone as it spat the sawdust into the trailer.  And the wood was a lighter, cleaner looking stream as it flowed into the box.  And soon they were gone too.  Of course, gone didn’t include the debris that the crew left far and wide.  Between sawdust, small branches and pine needles I’ll be cleaning up the tree bits for the whole of the spring.

But I’ll have to say I’m impressed by the state of the art in robotic forestry.  It sort of reminded me of a Dr. Seuss book where some absurdly complicated string of machines reprocesses some thing into a completely different substance.  The only thing missing were the absurdly bright primary and secondary colors along with Thing One and Thing Two running the machinery.  And come to think of it, the foreman did look a little like the guy who didn’t want to eat the Green Eggs and Ham.

Well, after they finished, I went to work and when I got back home the temperature had dropped down into the forties and it was once again raining cats and dogs.  You know I’m pretty sick and tired of the rain.  Last year it rained endlessly from April to the end of June.  I dream of kidnapping Camera Girl and dragging her to Southern Utah.  When I was there, there was a little snow but the ground looked like a desert and at this point that would be A-OK with me.  But the lure of the grandkids is too powerful for her.

So, I heard a little while ago that Israel counterattacked in Iran and some other places.  Well, that’s a little disturbing.  The way Joe Biden has been talking I think maybe they’re ready for some really bad things.  I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.  I guess I’m just sick and tired of the forever wars.  Maybe I’m so tired of it I’m willing to see it all blow up now.    Just fire them all and let God sort it all out.  It sounds right.

But then I think of the kids and the grandkids and of course I don’t want that to happen to them.  So apparently, I’ll have to let the morons we have running our foreign policy continue on with their insane games and their demented strategies.  Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Syria, China.  All that crap.

Humans are the most remarkably clever animals. Look at those machines I saw working today. Reducing those trees to dust was an acceleration over nature of many orders of magnitude. They reduced the work of twenty or fifty years of natural processes to machine minutes. We are that paragon of animals that Shakespeare mentions. But simultaneously we are led by gibbering idiots. They could reduce the whole human race to dust in minutes. So, there it is.

What is Wrong with This Picture?

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Look at where the country is headed in the next few months.  Donald Trump is the popular choice for president with about half of the voters in the United States.  And he is almost certainly going to be convicted of felonies in up to four different state and federal court legal trials.  Theoretically he could be given a combination of sentences that easily exceeds his life expectancy.

Now what is anyone to make of this?  It’s patently absurd.  Without even going through the charges like the hush money trial which obviously stretches the underlying statute completely out of its jurisdiction, all the charges are political prosecutions that have never been used in the way they are being presented.  An obvious example is the case involving classified documents.  Joe Biden had many classified documents in his possession and was in fact proven to be allowing someone without a security clearance to access these documents and he has been completely exempted from criminal penalties.  The naked fact that these are political prosecutions is impossible to obscure from insiders or the general public.

If Trump loses or is excluded from the presidential race then his future looks to be as a political prisoner in the banana republic jail that the Democrats now maintain for their enemies.  But even if he wins the election there may be state charges that even as president, he cannot pardon himself from.  What are we to imagine about the legitimate president of the United States officiating over his office from a state penitentiary?  Will he be allowed to leave the jail cell for the State of the Union speech?  How will his secret service detail spend their time behind bars?  Will they have to spend time watching over him in the dining room, the prison yard and in the workshop making license plates?

The blatant overreach and the pretense that all of this is legal and measured will probably strike anyone who isn’t a Democrat partisan zealot as proof that we’ve completely left equal treatment under the law far behind.  And that is the part that I believe makes this present situation novel.

What we will see will be the delegitimizing of the claim that this is a nation of laws.  There will be an ironclad example that proves that justice in present day America is no different than what existed in Stalin’s Soviet show trials or Mao’s Cultural Revolution struggle sessions or the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolutionary Reign of Terror.  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

So, this is a lesson that I learned over the course of the last four years.  Now the rest of America, even the most brain-dead will get a clear view of this on display.  I suppose the rest of the world will see it too.  And the myth of equal justice will be laid to rest.

But there’s a follow-on test we will observe.  What happens after this lesson is learned.  If the Left gets away with this and Americans just knuckle under to it, then we’ll also see another myth exposed.  That’s the one that says that Americans are proud of their freedom and won’t tolerate a tyrant.  That’s the one I’m waiting to find out about.  I can’t say I’m overly hopeful about this second one either.

Of Raspberries and Road Work

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner

Princess Sack of Potatoes is on Spring Vacation from Kindergarten so she is visiting. And so, she and Camera Girl went to the local lakeside park to play on the jungle gym and swings with the other paroled inmates of the local centers of lower education.

They’ve left me on my own recognizance and I am reveling in the freedom and using it to inspect my domain in the cloudless sunshine of the day star (Sol, G-type main-sequence star, G2V; approximately 4.6 billion years old).  And right away my leisure is disturbed by the state road crew and their private contractors come to remove the dying ash trees that threaten the power and communication lines during wind and snow events.  Unfortunately, one of the largest trees along the road is an enormous ash that adjoins the west field.  And his last day is now at hand.  The crew has a machine of incredible strength and capability.  It’s a gigantic arm that grips the tree near the top of the trunk with hydraulic fingers and then brings into play an enormous saw that cuts off the tree below the grasping hand.

Then the arm, defying gravity and inertia rotates at the shoulder and deposits the top of the tree on the side of the road.  Then it takes a purchase farther down on the trunk and repeats this operation a few times and voila, no more ash tree.  Just a pile of logs.  The crew then takes a conventional but enormous chain saw to the stump and bring it down to the ground in a few minutes and then off down the road to the next victim.  Ah well.  These ash trees have been dying off for decades.  My area is relatively off the beaten path so I guess it’s finally caught up to us.  American Chestnut, Elm, Ash.  Good heavens, what will be left in another few generations, you have to ask.  But I guess there is some hope.  The project to restore the American Chestnut either by selective breeding of the survivors or by genetic engineering of a hardy strain is slowly (but hopefully surely) reaching the end point where the trees will be released in to the world for regeneration of that majestic species in Eastern North America.

The thornless red raspberries that I planted a couple of years ago are back in leaf again and spreading nicely in the bed where I planted them.  They have been a rare case where the product lived up to the advertising.  They produce abundant, large, delicious fruit and they seem to thrive enthusiastically in the very boggy spring soil of that part of the property.  And since both Camera Girl and Princess Sack of Potatoes are big fans of this fruit, I have gained great praise for my project in introducing them to the yard.  This summer I hope for a bumper crop of many quarts of the fruit.  The only real hazard is the local black bear population.  With both blue berries and raspberries on site an ursine prowler is something to consider.  Well, I’ve got my bear spray.  Yogi beware.

Well, the girls are back so I must adjourn.  We must be at play in the fields of the Lord.

Small Towns, Politics and Life

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I like to mock my small town with my stories of Dunwich.  And it’s true that nowadays even small towns are caught up in the awful consequences of the blue state policies that reach down and afflict us with all the bad practices and crazy programs that are out there.

But small towns at least have the advantage that you are forced to see who it is that has to try and make the machine work regardless of the craziness of the system.  And the funny thing is that face to face with individual people they tend to look a lot like human beings.

And this is not saying that some of them aren’t crazy.  They most decidedly are.  The woke ideas that they’ve been steeped in for their whole lives has rendered a goodly number of them certifiably mad.  They advocate for the worst programs and ideas and claim that it all makes perfect sense.  Everything about them is backwards and upside down.

And yet, they’re still demonstrably human.  They have families and friends and they have tragedies afflict them like everyone else.  And when you hear of these things it reminds you of your own brushes with mortality and fate.  And unless you’re implacably driven you can’t help but feel empathy.

So, it’s a little harder to hate people so very entirely in a small town.  You have to see their faces and talk to them when you want to argue.  Your kids and grandkids go to the same schools and fairs and kids sports with their kids and grandkids.  And sure, you also go to the budget meetings and zoning meetings and disagree about taxes and school programs and road work but it’s hard to see them as the same as Joe Biden and the FBI and the IRS.  They’re not Goerge Soros sprinkling billions of dollars to corrupt justice.  They may want to waste thousands of dollars and fund projects that you think are wasteful and possibly harmful but they aren’t trying to destroy your family.  They vote for the people that are trying to destroy your family but they don’t think these things up themselves.

And when you get the chance to talk to some of them, they’re just as distressed as you are about the price of bread and meat being up forty percent in just four years.  They’re worried that their kids can’t afford to live in their own places because rents and real estate have skyrocketed.  They know that kids have been proselytized into believing that they can never achieve a middle-class existence on their own.  They’re scared for the future too.

I mention all this because during the day-to-day existence of reading the atrocities that the Left perpetrates on us, anyone can imagine the “civil war” erupting all around us and neighbors at each other’s throats.  And maybe in a big city it’s already sort of true.  Nobody knows anyone and random violence is a regular feature that goes hand in hand with anonymity.  But in a small town you even know the “devil” himself, the leader of the progressives.  And what does the devil look like?  It’s a middle-aged woman who volunteers on two or three town committees and wants to hire an extra librarian for the high school and get a new ambulance for the EMS crew.  Not precisely Klaus Schwab.

None of this changes the fact that we disagree diametrically with the things these people vote for.  In small ways, day after day, these people are contributing to the destruction of normal life.  They are a big part of the problem.  But when they are also your neighbors and you have to work with them to keep the town going hate is a lot harder to muster.  Annoyance definitely, and even anger, sure.  But hate is a stretch.